Not "catalogable," but neat Cardinals collectible

While this great 1950s St. Louis Cardinals collectible will not be included in the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards (though it would certainly fit if another edition of the SC of Baseball Memorabilia was ever forthcoming), it is certainly worth sharing.

What we have here is an evidently very scarce souvenir photo book of the 1953 Cardinals. It was brought to our attention by Kentucky collector Bobby Bazzell, who has for some time been trying to find any information about it.

What it is, is a small -- about 3-1/4" x 4-1/8" -- thick book of black-and-white glossy portrait and posed action photos of the '53 Cardinals. The heavy cardboard covers are printed in marbled gray, with the front design in red. I had to posterize the cover with Photoshop to make the design show up. As you can see, it has a Cardinals bird logo at center, with the team nickname above and the date below.

Inside the book are pasted two (or possibly three) sets of accordian-fold page strips. The front and back of each panel is die-cut to allow the corners of a 2-3/16" x 3" photo to be inserted.

There are 29 photos in the book. The tricky part is that none of the photos are identified. There is no printing on the pages to indicate which player's picture should be inserted into which page, nor is the player name printed anywhere on the photos. The posed action photos have some nice stadium backgrounds, and these are not photos that are familiar to me from baseball card appearances or other widespread distribution.

The only identification is names that have been pencilled in, presumably by the original young owner of the book. Besides some misspellings and partial names, however, the kid appears to have gotten some of the names wrong.

It's easy to pick out the Hall of Famers and regulars like Musial, Schoendienst, Slaughter, Mizell, Haddix, etc., but who can identify benchwarmers from the 1953 team like Farrell Anderson, Mike Clark or Jackie Collum.

Bazzell has been giving it the old college try, comparing the pictures in the book with the images on 1952 and 1953 Topps cards, and with the pictures in Bob Broeg's book, A Century of Cardinals Baseball. He still has questions about some of the pictures, though. He sent photocopies of the pictures to the Cardinals Hall of Fame Museum in St. Louis. His identifications in some cases were confirmed, but for other pictures, the museum curator and staff came up with different suggested names . . . and some they couldn't even guess at.

Besides the enigmatic photographs, there are questions still to be answered about the nature of the book, principally: How was it distributed, and how widely?

Just spit-balling here, but I'm not thinking this was a concession stand souvenir or otherwise intended to be sold to the general fandom. Such items generally provided full player identification. The lack thereof makes me wonder if what we have here is an item that was promulgated as a keepsake for the players themselves, or possibly for the press or others closely associated with the club.

If you can shed any light on the origins of this photo book, please comment here or send me an email to scbcguy@yahoo.com.

Standard Catalog Update #32 : BF104 Additions

As has been the case virtually edition since we began listing the 1937 BF104 (American Card Catalog designation) felt blankets a decade or so ago, we are able to make an addition to the checklist for the 2011 book; this time through the courtesy of Roger Marth.

Roger sent the scans above of newly reported BF104s of Chicago Cubs Stan Hack and Charlie Root.

Not nearly as colorful as the earlier-generation 1914 BF2 blankets, the 1937 version are much scarcer. It is likely that for most of the 32 known players, only the example that was used to verify the report to the Standard Catalog exists in hobby hands. That makes quite a challenge for single-player specialists. Even when a specimen becomes available, it can get quite pricey. BF104s in VG condition can bring $100-200 for even a "common" player.

While the checklist currently contains a number of the bigger stars of the day, such as Hank Greenberg and Dizzy Dean, the really top names, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio, have yet to be reported.

Standard Catalog Update #29A : Erskine Variation

Please excuse my several days' hiatus from new postings to the blog; like many of you I've been sick.

The first order of business is to post this update to the Sept. 24 posting about the variation on 1954 Bowman Carl Erskine, card #10 in the set. You may wish to click on the "older posts" link at the bottom for a refresher on that column.

Basically it boils down to a variation of the Erskine card on which two lower loops of the facsimile autograph of card #2, Jack Jensen, were carried over into the background sky in the upper-left of Erskine's card.

Subsequent to receiving the initial report from 707 Sportscards, I had made a couple of cursory attempts to confirm the variation by checkling scans of Erskine cards posted for sale on various internet sites. I had no luck in those searches.

Now we do have confirmation of the variation, certified (the card, not the variation) by PSA, no less. The card pictured at left belongs to collector Peter Eilenberg.

After having searched 35-50 images of different '54B Erskines without a "hit," I was beginning to wonder if we'd ever turn up a second example. As I told Peter, if you have one of these "with loops" variations, hold onto it, it could be quite rare.

Plans call for the variation to be listed in the 2011 Standard Catalog, but unless we see a couple of them sell at auction, it may initially carry a "Value Undetermined" notice, rather than a "book" price.

Standard Catalog Update #19A : Sports Heroes Stickers

In our Aug. 24 posting we opened the topic of the 1964-65 (exact date of issue uncertain) Sports Heroes stickers from Hunter Publishing Co., Winston-Salem, N.C. Actually, we should probably catalog them as Sports Heroes Monograms, as that's how they are described on the sheet on which they were issued in team sets of four players.


We can now update the checklist with a quartet of San Francisco Giants reported to us by Jim at 707 Sportscards. Unfortunately, the players: Jim Davenport, Jim Ray Hart, Orlando Cepeda and, of course, Willie Mays, can't help pinpoint the date of issue, since they were all with the Giants in both seasons.


Also yet to be determined is the full extent of the issue. We have so far seen that team sets were issued for the Detroit Tigers, New York Yankees, Pittsburgh Pirates and St. Louis Cardinals, besides the Giants.

On a related note, Jim reports that he has seen the Mickey Mantle sticker with two sizes of the portrait.

As always, if you can add to the checklist with a scan or photocopy, please enter a comment here, or email me at scbcguy@yahoo.com.

Tales of T212 #14 : Mickey LaLonge

Back in the early 1980s I thought I'd combine my interests in minor league baseball and vintage baseball cards by assembling a collection of the Obak cigarette cards that were distributed on the West Coast in 1909, 1910 and 1911.I didn't realize it then, but those cards are so much rarer than most of the contemporary T206 cards from "Back East" that putting together complete sets of the Obak could take decades to accomplish -- and that's if a guy had more money than God to buy the cards when they became available.At about the time I started my Obak collection I also started researching the players who appeared in the sets. Over the course of several long Wisconsin winters I pored over microfilms of The Sporting News and The Sporting Life from the period several years before to several years after the Obak cards circulated, making prodigious notes on 3x5 file cards for each player in the set.I gave up trying to collect the T212s (that's the catalog number Jefferson Burdick assigned the three sets in the pioneering American Card Catalog in 1939), long ago, and have since sold off all my Obaks, one-by-one, first on eBay, then on the Net 54 baseball card forum. As I was selling each card, I included interesting tidbits about each player from my notes. The bidders seemed to like learning a little bit about these guys on the cards, so I thought I'd now begin sharing their stories here.

Lewis W. "Mickey" LaLonge had a long career (1906-1924) as a catcher in the higher levels of the minor leagues in the U.S. and Canada, but never had even a game at the major league level, probably because he was a lifetime .250 hitter, who never had more than three home runs in a season.

LaLonge was born in Dundee, Mich., and played his first pro ball at the age of 24 for Akron in the Class C Ohio-Pennsylvania League in 1906-1907. He moved out to the West Coast for the 1908-1912 seasons, where, except for 1910, when he was exlusive with Sacramento in the PCL, he split time each season between two clubs: San Francisco and Oakland in 1908, Oakland and Sacramento in 1909, Sac'to and Portland in 1911, and, Portland and Tacoma (NWL) in 1912.

He moved east to play for Buffalo in 1913-1915 in the Class AA International League. He split time between Louisville and Columbus in the American Association in 1916, then went back to the IL with Toronto in 1917.

He was signed by Kansas City for 1918, but jumped to the "outlaw" Steel League with Lebanon, Pa. He returned to OB with K.C. in 1919, his last year in the upper reaches of the minors. He again jumped his contract with the K.C. Blues in 1920, to play independent ball at Oil City, Pa. and Newcastle (state unknown).

In 1922, LaLonge once again returned to organized baseball as playing manager for Brantford in the Michigan-Ontario League. In 1924 he was the pitching coach for Cornell University, then, at the age of 40 resurrected his playing career at the Class B level with Harrisburg and Wilkes Barre of the New York-Pennsylvania League, and Rocky Mount in the Virginia League, hitting a respectable .306.

LaLonge signed on as a coach with Toronto in 1927. His last known pro ball assignments were as manager in the Pennsylvania-Ohio-New York League in 1939 with Jamestown, and 1940 with London.

In the off-seasons, LaLonge worked a silver mine he owned in Canada.

Globe Printing Co. historical data comes to light

For as long as I've been writing baseball card columns, one of the topics that nevers seems to fail to generate reader response is the series of minor league team sets, albums and "Souvenir Pictures" booklets issued between 1949-1954 (mostly 1951-1952) by Globe Printing Co.


The pair of posting that appeared on this blog on Aug. 25-26 proved to be no exception. After those posts were reprinted in Sports Collectors Digest, I received a phone call from Bill Weiss of San Meteo, Calif. Long-time baseball fans and historians, especially those with an appreciation for the minor leagues, will remember Weiss as the official statistician and unofficial historian of the California League, the Pacific Coast League and several other western minor leagues for more than 40 years, beginning in 1949. Weiss has written extensively on a wide and diverse range of baseball subjects and for many years his column was a staple in Baseball America. Bill has been retired for a good while now, but still maintains an active interest in his lifelong passion.

As a first-hand witness to what was going on in the world of minor league baseball 60 years ago, his phone call with information about Globe Printing Co. was especially welcome.

According to Weiss, Globe Printing was a San Jose, Calif., firm owned by Jack Anderson. The company's association with minor league baseball began in 1949, when Globe produced a yearbook, titled Your California League. The pages devoted to each team presented player photos in the approximate size and in the format that collectors now associate with the company's baseball card issues: Full-length poses with the player name in a white strip at bottom.

According to Weiss, Globe's first baseball card set was produced that same year for the Stockton Ports, sponsored by Sunbeam Bread and unusual for Globe issues in that there is advertising and player biographical data on the back. A similar set was produced in 1950.

A number of similarly formatted card sets were issued for PCL teams in that era, including the Sunbeam-sponsored card sets of the 1946-1947 Sacramento Solons, Oakland Oaks sets in 1946-1947 and 1949-1950 sponsored by Remar Bread, and in 1947-1948 sponsored by Smith's Clothing store, and, the 1948-1949 S.F. Seals sets sponsored by Sommer & Kaufmann boy's clothier. It is unknown whether Globe printed those sets or just drew heavily on their design.

Weiss said that 1949 Stockton set was initially printed in blue ink, later switching to black. He said the cards were distributed four at a time in a folder as a stadium giveaway, which is likely the manner of distribution for many of Globe's later card issues, considering the dearth of complete set, and even the lack of complete checklists for many of the team sets.

Globe continued to print programs and other promotional items for minor league teams, and in 1951-1954 really cranked up its efforts in the area of team-sponsored baseball card sets, with more than two dozen card sets (and a handful of picture albums) for big- and small-market minor league teams from Ventura, Calif., to Miami Beach, Fla. The breadth and depth of Globe's card sets are scattered throughout the Vintage Minor League section of the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards.

In discussing the various Globe Printing items that he has in his archives, Weiss provided several nuggets if special interest to vintage minor league collectors. He has a six-card sheet of the 1952 Ventura Braves (I've also seen one), that has marginal notations that 3,000 of the sheet were to be delivered before April 14. This indicates to me that Globe did most or all of its baseball card printing in sheets of six. Indeed, many of the checklists of known Globe issues consist of 12 or 18 cards.

Bill also provides information on an heretofore uncataloged Globe card set. He has among his holdings an album for the 1952 Bakersfield Indians (though he has none of the cards). Thus we can expect to someday be treated to the discovery of one or more cards from that California League team, though there won't be any future or former major league stars on its checklist, probably the biggest names being Hank Aguirre and Gene Lillard. (A similar album for the 1952 Visalia Cubs is believed to exist, though to date no cards from the set have been cataloged.)

Finally, Weiss relates a tale that will bring a tear to the collector's eye. Some years ago, Globe Printing Co. had "boxes and boxes" of cards and other printed material in the basement of its plant on South First St. in San Jose when a flood occurred and destroyed all of it.

I imagine that a thorough Google search on Globe Printing could turn up more information, such as the company's destiny, but that will have to wait for another time or another researcher.

Many thanks to Bill Weiss for coming forth to share his knowledge about Globe Printing's baseball cards and related issues.

Correction to Sept. 16 Just So column

Corrections have been made to the Sept. 16 posting about the discovery of a Buck Ewing card in the Just So tobacco card set of 1893 Cleveland Spiders.

In the original posting I had mistakenly noted that Hall of Fame shortstop Geprge S. Davis appears in the set.

Veteran collector Andy Baran correctly points out that the player is actually pitcher George W. Davies, and that, indeed, the caption on the portrait is "G.W. Davies".

Standard Catalog Update #26B : Checklist Complete!

Thanks to a tip from Larry Serota, we now have a complete checklist for the 1955 Wilson Meats baseball tips booklets. The subject was first raised on this blog on Sept. 18, if you want to read more in-depth on the issue.

Larry clued us in that Booklet #2, "Batting and Fielding Secrets by Ted Williams" was being offered in the current (closing Nov. 3) auction by Andy Madec Sportscards, where it carries a minimum bid of $200.

With T.W. revealed as the "author" of Booklet #2, the checklist stands complete: #1 Bob Feller, #2 Ted Williams, #3 Harvey Kueen, #4 Sammy White.

It will be interesting to watch the bidding on the Williams booklet, as it is a caree-contemporary piece of memorabilia that is associated with the issuer one of his scarcest and most popular baseball cards and is, in itself, extremely rare.

Tales of T212 #13 : S.S. Flannagan

Back in the early 1980s I thought I'd combine my interests in minor league baseball and vintage baseball cards by assembling a collection of the Obak cigarette cards that were distributed on the West Coast in 1909, 1910 and 1911.I didn't realize it then, but those cards are so much rarer than most of the contemporary T206 cards from "Back East" that putting together complete sets of the Obak could take decades to accomplish -- and that's if a guy had more money than God to buy the cards when they became available.At about the time I started my Obak collection I also started researching the players who appeared in the sets. Over the course of several long Wisconsin winters I pored over microfilms of The Sporting News and The Sporting Life from the period several years before to several years after the Obak cards circulated, making prodigious notes on 3x5 file cards for each player in the set.I gave up trying to collect the T212s (that's the catalog number Jefferson Burdick assigned the three sets in the pioneering American Card Catalog in 1939), long ago, and have since sold off all my Obaks, one-by-one, first on eBay, then on the Net 54 baseball card forum. As I was selling each card, I included interesting tidbits about each player from my notes. The bidders seemed to like learning a little bit about these guys on the cards, so I thought I'd now begin sharing their stories here.

"Flannagan," The Mystery Beaver

This player who appeared only in the 1910 Obak set, with his name misspelled as "Flannagan" is one of the few whom I never definitively identified in my years of Obak research. It was only years later, as I began actually writing this series, that I found out who he was from the SABR Minor Leagues database.

My early notecard on Flannagan offered as possibilities James F. or Edward J., who had played the outfield and pitched, respectively, for the 1909 Vancouver Beavers of the Northwestern League. Neither played there in 1910. Since it is my impression that Obak made few, if any, errors such as producing a card for a player who wasn't on a particular team in the year the card was issued, I wasn't comfortable designating the card-guy Flanagan as either James or Edward.

S.S. Flanagan (his full name is not recorded by SABR, nor any biographical details), played for Vancouver in both 1908 and 1910. He is not shown as playing anywhere in organized baseball in 1909. He had batted .351 for the Beavers in 1908, but his a career low of .209 in 1910 and was demoted to the Class D Union Assn. at Boise for 1911.

He rebounded at Boise and hit .342. That earned him a call back to Class B play with Decatur of the Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League for the remainder of his known pro career (1912-1915).

1954 Vern Law : Update to 09/06 post

Back on Sept. 6, I posted an entry about the 1954 Topps Vern Law card.

The back of the card has a line for the previous season's stats that was supposed to read "IN MILITARY SERVICE," but the I in IN is missing.

I just noticed that when Sports Illustrated reprinted (on thin, glossy, magazine stock) some cards from the '54T set, they corrected that error.

Just though you'd like to know.

Standard Catalog Update #31 : 1960 Carling Beer Indians

It's probably been more than 10 years since we added the 1955-61 Carling Beer Cleveland Indians premium pictures to the Standard Catalog. I'm embarrassed now to admit that I don't remember who provided the checklists and photocopies for the first listings.

The premiums all share a similar format. They are 8-1/2" x 12," blank-backed, printed on semi-gloss thin cardboard stock. Pictures are almost all posed action shots. The wide borders at bottom have advertising for Black Label beer. The premiums were probably distributed as over-the-counter handouts where the beer was sold.

A small alphanumeric designation with a "DBL" (most years) or "LB" (1961) prefix in the lower-right corner allows us to differentiate between years of issue.

Initially we checklisted 11 players for 1956, 10 each in 1956-58, six in 1959 and 10 in 1961. I always found in curious that there were no 1969 Carling Indians premiums. No premium with a suffix higher than "L" is known, and in only one year (1958) is a picture known with suffix "I" or "J." This probably indicates that for most years the issue was complete at 10 pictures.

Now, thanks to collector Glen Van Aken, we have a start at a 1960 checklist. He sent a scan of Bubba Phillips, who had been traded from the Tigers to Cleveland for 1960. The Phillips premium has the number DBL 247E (as opposed to DBL420 in 1961). Unlike earlier Carling issues, which had a line of type at bottom listing the brands regional brewery locations, the 1960 premium lists only Cleveland. That format was continued in 1961.

We'd be especially happy to hear from you if you can add any pictures to our checklists for this issue.

Standard Catalog Update #24A : Green Harrington's

An update is in order to our Standard Catalog Update #24 blog posting of Sept. 15.

That post concerned a 1928 Harrington's card of Earl Smith that went to auction Oct. 2.

The auction closed without the card meeting a reported reserve of $40,000. The minimum bid had been pegged at $10,000, and by the time the auction closed, three bids had been placed, but the Heritage web site does not specify how high the bids went.

The card is now available on the Heritage web site at $47,800, with a notation that lower offers will be considered.

How did y'all pay for YOUR football cards?

The cabbage moths never came this year.

I don't know whether it was due to global warming or to the freakishly cold, dry summer we had here in northcentral Wisconsin. (I so love the irony of that.) I just know that driving home after work at this time of year, the fields should be full of the little black-speckled moths, but that there aren't any.

I also know that if this had happened 50 years ago, it would have put a major dent in my football card buying.

Back in the late 1950s and very early 1960s when I was a pre-teen living in Fond du Lac, Wis., the arrival of the cabbage moths in the fields on the western end of the city and the arrival of the year's first football cards on the shelves of the mom-and-pop grocery stores in the neighborhood coincided with the beginning of the school year.

By that time the card collectors in my neighborhood -- that meant just about everyone, except girls and queers -- were pretty much done with baseball cards for the year (except for the all-star cards in the high-number series), and unless there was a particularly cool or gory non-sports set such as Space, Mars Attacks or Civil War News, all of our attention was turned to football cards.

For a number of those years, I financed my football card purchases with cabbage moths. It wasn't a direct batrer system, you understand, there was a middle man.

At that time and place, the western edge of the city was defined by the multi-lane Highway 41 that ran north and south between the Michigan border and (or so we were told, but never really believed) Miami, Fla. Between the last street in our neighborhood and Hwy. 41 was a stretch of prarie-like fields and the "West Side Ditch." The Ditch was a wide man-made gully, perhaps 15 feet across at the top and narrowing to three or four feet at the bottom. It was there to direct the occasional heavy rainfall or winter ice melt from the storm sewer system to Lake Winnebago.

Nearly dry for most of the year, the Ditch was a good place for kids to get away from the prying eyes of parents, nosy neighbors and cops, to play army or doctor, to smoke, to look at dirty magazines and just hang out. The Ditch was also a natural attraction for cabbage moths, perhaps because of the residual rills and puddles of water at the bottom, or perhaps because it offered a refuge from the autumn wind, or perhaps because its plant life was high on the moths' menu.

We didn't think much about why the moths were there in the early autumn, we just knew that they WERE there and that just a couple of blocks away, there was a guy who would pay cash for them . . . cash that could be converted into football cards.

If I ever knew the moth man's name, I've long since forgotten it, or blocked it from my memory. All the kids in the neighborhood knew his house, though, and that he paid a penny apiece for cabbage moths. White or yellow, it didn't matter, and he wasn't too picky about whether they were alive or dead. We never knew for sure what he did with the moths he bought. It was rumored that he was a science professor at the college in Oshkosh, so maybe he used them as lab specimens or in research.

The guy also paid a nickel apiece for frogs, but they were the bounty of the older kids, and if one of them caught us with more than one frog in our possession within a couple of blocks of the Ditch, we were subject to the Indian grass torture or a hinder-binder, and the loss of our frogs.

For kids our age, in that time, a penny apiece for cabbage moths was good money. On a Saturday afternoon you could easily net 20-30 of them in an hour or so, and that translated to a thick stack of wax packs.

While it seemed like easy money, chasing the moths up and down the slopes of the Ditch must have been harder work than I remember. When I'd take my mason jar of moths to the "professor's" house, he'd always invite me in for a glass of his special punch.

I recall that the punch tasted a good deal like normal Hawaiian Punch, but there was some sort of thicker, sweeter taste there that I could never identify, but which sometimes springs to mind even today when I'm enjoying a fruity cocktail.

I'd drink the punch while he counted the flittering moths through the glass of the jar. I always had a pretty good idea how many moths I'd brought, and he never tried to short me on the payment. If anything, he seemed to always round up to the nearest nickel.

After a little while, the moth-chasing and the warmth of his sun-drenched living room (even with the shades drawn) frequently compelled me to stretch out on the couch and lay my head on a pillow.

Those must not have been particularly restful naps, though. I must have tossed and turned a lot. I recall that frequently I'd wake up with my t-shirt on backwards or inside-out and . . . wait! . . . what?

Standard Catalog Update #26A : Worth a picture

As noted in a comment to Standard Catalog Update #26 on Sept. 18, through the courtesy of a reader we are able to add one to the checklist of 1955 Wilson Mets Baseball Booklets.

Though he didn't leave his name, the fellow who submitted the scan of Bob Feller's Pointers on Pitching booklet was Rick Payne, an Ohio collector.

And, hey, on the internet it doesn't cost anything to post a picture, so . . . why not?